by Stacy Green
Her head whipped back and forth, her dirty, long dark hair going with it. “You’re a liar.”
I inched forward. “No I’m not. I promise you’re safe. And I’ll keep you safe.” I wasn’t prepared for the fierce protectiveness that welled in my chest at the sight of this damaged girl. I knew then I’d do whatever it took to keep my promise.
Kelly drew her knees tighter to her chest, her dull eyes squinting at me as I came to stand at the foot of the cot.
“But I understand why you don’t trust me. I’ll wait here until you’re ready.”
More than an hour later, she finally uncurled her legs and took her first step toward freedom. From that moment on, I vowed to help her heal, no matter how long it took.
Damnit, Kelly. We’ve been in this together. Why didn’t you tell me?
“You were moving. Starting over.” Justin cut into my memories. “She thought it was your only shot at getting a normal life back. If you knew about Tesla, you wouldn’t have gone.”
I’d have tracked him down and killed him. Kelly’s gang of abusers had always been on my list, but she didn’t know their names. Had she been lying, or did seeing Tesla’s face jog her memory?
“When we met, she was already investigating Tesla. I think she just needed someone to talk to. For some reason, she chose me.” Emotion colored his words. I kept my eyes on Tesla’s driveway.
“You said you’ve seen the emails between Tesla and Jake Meyer,” I said. “They were sent from the son’s account.”
“His Penn State account, which is really stupid,” Justin said. “The school owns that account and can dig into it whenever they want. That’s probably what got him kicked out. Kelly says it would have been easy for his father to use it.”
“And the son would know he’d been used.” That aspect didn’t surprise me. A man like Robert Tesla Sr. had money and a reputation to protect. People threw their kids away for far less.
“That’s our theory. Robert Tesla might not suspect his dad, but we wanted to find out. That’s why I was selling him pot. Keeping him medicated made him easier to talk to.”
But Kelly wouldn’t have trusted Justin with getting the information. She’d want to do it herself, make sure all of her questions were asked. “And who did the talking?”
“Kelly.” Justin’s mouth twitched into a smile. “She pretended to be interested in him and tried to get information. She wasn’t as good as you are, but she’s learning.”
I twisted in the seat, torn between betrayal and pride in her actions. “You’re telling me Kelly went into that house alone?”
He glared at me. “No way! She wasn’t ready for that, and I didn’t want her to. She’d meet him for dates in public places.”
“And what did she find out?” My stomach felt antsy. Insight into Kelly’s life would only help if it gave me a location to search.
“He hates his father,” Justin said. “His mother does too. Robert’s pissed his daddy didn’t keep him from getting kicked out of Penn State. He told Kelly his dad laundered all sorts of money and a bunch of other conspiracy theories.” Justin shrugged. “She didn’t know if the laundering was true, but she said she’d try to find out in case he didn’t get hauled in for the trafficking.”
“The statute of limitations hasn’t passed on her rape. It started when she was fifteen. In Pennsylvania, child sexual assault victims born before 2002 have 12 years after their 18th birthday to file charges.”
“We didn’t talk about that,” Justin said. “She just wanted to get enough to put him in jail now. I don’t think…”
“She didn’t want to testify about the rapes.” That was the main reason her stepfather had gotten away without naming any of his co-conspirators. No one blamed Kelly, and I couldn’t hold it against her now. She shouldn’t have to relive that in front of a jury, especially if she had to go against well known and respected men like Tesla.
“What about Jake Meyer?” I asked. “Did she bring that up to Tesla?”
“Yesterday,” Justin said. “They went to a movie, I hung around outside. She finally got the conversation headed that way, but she didn’t really get enough. He did say someone framed him, but she couldn’t get any information on his dad.”
“A movie.” A stinging sensation echoed through my chest. She’d lied to me. “That’s the movie she was at when I called after Shannon’s body was found.”
He twisted around, trying to look contrite. “You would have come straight back here. You were already worried about her. And you would have done something bad.” He looked down at his constantly moving hands. “She was afraid it would be something you couldn’t come back from.”
“So she put herself in serious harm’s way with no experienced backup.” God, I wanted to be angry. But to hear how far she’d come, to know she was ready to take on something like this, putting herself out there…I felt only pride.
“That’s why you should go back to her place and ask her,” Justin said. “She wouldn’t want me telling you all of this.”
“I can’t ask her right now.” I frowned at him, making sure my expression looked as disapproving as possible.
“Why?”
The lie came deliciously easy. “She had a breakdown and checked herself into a mental health center. No visitors for three days. I’ll let you infer what caused the breakdown.”
I should have thought of that earlier. No matter. He’d believe it, and I had time without his breathing down my neck.
His head dropped to his chest. “You’re kidding. She seemed okay–more than okay. Every day, I asked her if she was handling it. If she needed to stop. She promised she’d tell me if she did.”
“You can’t seriously be surprised.” My jealousy pushed the issue. “She’s got PTSD, and she just jumped into this. You should have called me.”
“She’s stronger than you think,” he shot back. “You can’t control everything.”
We glared at each other, the throbbing in my head making me see spots. My control issues were none of his business. “What was her end game?”
Kelly didn’t have any poison that I knew of. But after hearing all of this, I had no doubt she would be resourceful enough to get it.
“She wanted to gather as much evidence on Tesla as possible. She said that her stepdad let several different men down there, but there were three main ones, in addition to him. She remembers them sounding like friends.”
“I know. Like a gang of pigs.” Kelly’s stepdad had denied all the allegations of allowing other men to attack Kelly, but he’d pled guilty to her rape and imprisonment. Because of Cook’s refusal to name co-conspirators, the only hope was if Kelly testified. And it was a slim one.
“Please tell him I can’t do it,” Kelly had begged me. “I can’t get up there and talk about it in front of a jury. And I don’t know their names. Please, Lucy!”
I’d spent an hour arguing with the prosecution, and the attorneys finally agreed not to ask Kelly to testify.
“So she wanted to try to find them all and then give my brother the evidence,” Justin said.
Of course she did. She was better than me in so many ways. “But Kelly has been on this property?”
Justin nodded.
So Tesla Sr. very easily could have recognized her. She was a threat to him, and he could have decided to eliminate her. But where did Shannon come into all this? Or the aspect of revenge against me? How did it all tie together?
“Has she had any contact with Tesla Sr. or her stepfather?”
Justin pulled on his ear lobe, looking down at his lap. “No. But she’s got the names of the other guys. Through one of the programs she has access to.”
“What program?” Surely not something associated with the police department. Too risky.
“It’s some kind of analyst program,” he said. “I guess there are companies that aggregate personal information for profit. Addresses, jobs, phones, car info, some financials. Basically they follow consumer trends and catalog them
, and then they sell the information to marketing firms.”
I couldn’t believe what he was saying. Justin had just described the case analysis team at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children–a place that had some of the best online security protocol I’d ever seen. The only way Kelly would have access to the information was through me, and I hadn’t given her any of my log in info.
And then I remembered the day nearly a year ago, when we’d needed to get into Brian Harrison’s computer.
It’s easy to put a Trojan into someone’s system. You just send them an email with something you know they’ll click on, and then you’ve got access. You can even get usernames and passwords if you know what you’re doing.
And Kelly definitely knew what she was doing.
Kelly had discovered Tesla shortly before I’d left. We’d had lengthy discussions about the resources at NCMEC.
She’d stolen my access information.
I couldn’t stop the smile creeping over my face. Justin looked even more nervous, inching away from me.
“Go home,” I said. “I’ve got something I need to do.”
13
My laptop battery crapped out as soon as I opened it. Time continued to sail by, each new hour bringing with it a fresh image of Kelly and the horrors she could be going through.
Had she been raped again? The thought made me sick enough I would have vomited if my stomach wasn’t already empty. But Shannon hadn’t been raped. Just mentally and physically tortured. Another thought slithered around the recesses of my consciousness.
What if Kelly survived all of this?
How did someone come back from a second time of being held prisoner? All the trust she’d gained toward the world would be obliterated. What would be left for her?
Entertaining the thought got me nowhere. One horrific thing at a time, and right now, I had to get into NCMEC’s system.
I hated the thought of leaving the Tesla estate, but after hearing Justin’s information, I had little hope of finding Kelly on the property. If the elder Tesla had managed to evade authorities all these years, he wasn’t stupid enough to hide her anywhere near his private oasis.
My eyes kept straying to the rearview mirror as I drove down the hill and into the lifeline of the Chestnut Hill area. Had the man followed?
With the Tesla property disappearing in the rearview mirror, I felt like I’d abandoned Kelly.
But none of the information added up. I couldn’t reconcile Kelly being taken by Tesla for his own personal gain to the cool, controlled ego of the man who’d taunted me on the video. He’d made it very clear this was at least in part about me. And he’d referenced Shannon. But why would Tesla go after Shannon or me? The idea of me as a threat to him now made little sense. If Justin’s story was true, then Kelly was the threat.
Was Shannon’s reference just a diversion?
Very little surprised me anymore. But I’d be shocked if a wealthy, prominent and most likely very paranoid man like Robert Tesla Sr. broke into Kelly’s apartment. If he was behind the abduction, then he had help.
And that might make more sense. Perhaps Tesla had found some twisted thug to do the hard stuff. Someone with experience scaring the hell out of people. Maybe Shannon’s abduction had been completely unrelated, and Tesla had just used it to his advantage to taunt me in the video.
But two people with connections to me being taken within weeks of each other? No chance for a coincidence. Both abductions had to be connected. I couldn’t allow both to end up in murder.
More than half the day was gone now, and Kelly’s hours dwindled. Every single second ticked off like a bomb in my chest. If my count was close, she had roughly thirty-two hours left. My only hope was figuring out what she had gleaned from my NCMEC access.
Germantown Avenue in Chestnut Hill on a busy summer afternoon wasn’t the ideal place to work, but I didn’t have the time to search for a more secluded area. I ducked into a coffee shop on the lower level of a centuries-old building, quickly ordered a coffee and a pastry, and then found the nearest charging station.
I wondered if the man followed me or if he’d left the area after sending his cryptic text. One by one, I stared down every patron in the small coffee place. They were all women, some teenagers. The lone male in the place looked older than my stepfather and decidedly unhealthier.
I didn’t bother with Kelly’s computer. Whatever information was there would be hidden deep within her hard drive, and I wasn’t skilled enough to find it with any sort of speed. Instead, I logged into the NCMEC Portal on my laptop and began going over the search history. Since I’d only been working there a few months, the search for Tesla’s information showed up quickly.
I’d never noticed it before because I wasn’t looking, but my lack of attention to detail bothered me. Maybe if I’d noticed, I would have caught onto Kelly’s plan and stopped everything before it started.
Staring at pages and pages of data that went back decades, my eyes quickly blurred. I’d always known privacy was a myth, especially in the digital world, but seeing the sheer amount of information tracked from search engines, public records, and our digital footprints never ceased to amaze me.
The information the companies stored barely landed on the side of legal, and they were amazingly efficient in their collections. Which meant figuring out the specific information Kelly had taken from the search would be tricky.
Four addresses came up for Tesla. The system’s history showed Kelly had found them as well. He’d owned the estate in Chestnut Hill for five years, with his previous address being in Society Hill, another historic area with plenty of wealth. Tesla had been living there during the time of Kelly’s imprisonment. Society Hill was at least a twenty-minute drive from the northeastern neighborhood where Kelly had endured her torture. Zero evidence of a connection to her stepfather.
How did a prestigious fundraiser for one of the city’s top universities hook up with a lower income, jack-of-all-trades like her stepfather?
Jared Cook had been working at a rental car company when I discovered Kelly locked in the basement. I tried wading through the information for a sign of Tesla using the rental company, but found nothing.
Doesn’t mean that’s not how they met. Penn State could have paid for the rental. Or another company. It’s still a viable possibility.
Next came cellphone carriers, local phone companies, charity donations. Useless data after useless data. All pivotal when searching for a missing kid, but no help for me.
What else would Kelly have been looking for?
More names, obviously. When she finally began to talk about her time in the basement, she said there were three men who returned week after week, but she didn’t know their names, and she felt guilty.
“Another girl is going to go through the same thing because I don’t have the answers.” Her head dropped to her hands. She’d cut her hair, and the stylish bob suited her.
I touched her shoulder, careful of her boundaries. “Listen to me. None of this is your fault. There’s nothing you could have done differently. And Jared Cook made all of this happen. He’s in jail.”
Kelly wiped a tear. “But what about those other men?”
“Hopefully they’re too scared of getting caught to hurt anyone else.” It was the first and only time I’d lied to Kelly.
I had no doubt that as soon as she made the connection to Telsa Sr., she would have wanted to find their names and find a way to tie them to Tesla.
And then deliver the information to Todd? She had to have more of an end game.
A few more minutes in the search history gave me the names.
Hours after Kelly searched for Robert Tesla Sr., she’d searched for two more men, one right after another. Dr. Adam Barton and Brent Johanssen. She must have dug much deeper into Tesla’s information to find them.
I’d forgotten about the pastry and coffee. I took another bite and then combined the men’s name and entered a new search.
The page took ages to load. My noisy brain ran scenarios, determined to connect the dots between these men and the need to lash out at me. What had I done to them?
The simple answer was that I’d taken away Kelly and their private playground. Her stepdad would have known my name. But that had been so many years ago. Was he still in contact with the others? From prison? I doubted it, since all of that information would be logged by the correctional facility in Greensburg where Jared Cook was serving his sentence. Too bad I didn’t have the time to request a visit.
So my crusade against Jake Meyer had put Tesla’s name on the creep radar. He tossed his son into the storm, effectively covering his tracks. Then Kelly came around. I could buy he abducted her to silence her.
But Shannon and the revenge angle against me still didn’t ring true.
The page finally loaded. My search called up phone and address information for Philadelphia Renovations. The company appeared to be in the business of gentrification, working with the city to restore the decaying historical homes. Several names were associated with the company, all of them day-to-day operations people who would only be able to give me the run around. But tax records showed the company was co-owned by Dr. Adam Barton, a successful pediatrician with a twenty-year-old practice; Brent Johansen, a civil engineer; and Robert Tesla Sr. Kelly must have searched each man individually. Had she found pictures? Would she recognize them?
My fingers felt lifeless as I clicked on the company website. Their opening slideshow was impressive: before pictures of dying, old homes and after pictures of dazzling renovations. Contact information for the same operations people I’d already bypassed.
Company history.
The pictures loaded one by one as if the Internet had decided to break the news to me slowly. Tesla came first. He looked like an older, more distinguished version of his pot-smoking son.
Next came Dr. Adam Barton. A pale reed of a middle-aged man with thick, unruly hair, Barton’s bio described him as a pediatrician noted for his successful practice and easygoing demeanor. Kids and parents loved him.
